Feminist Critical Analysis Research Articles

They Know it When They See it: The UK Gender Recognition Act 2004

This article is a critical feminist analysis of the UK Gender Recognition Act of 2004. This Act is radical in enabling transgenders to gain certificates recognising their new ‘acquired gender’ without undergoing hormonal or surgical treatment. The Act has considerable implications for marriage, for motherhood and fatherhood, for women who are the partners of men or women who ‘transition’ and for ‘women-only’ spaces. It is based on confusing and contradictory notions of the difference between sex and gender. As such it should be of great interest to feminists but there has been a dearth of feminist commentary. The understandings of sex and gender and of the importance of the Act will be explored here through analysis of the parliamentary debates and public responses.

Women’s Experience of Rage: A Critical Feminist Analysis

We conducted in-depth interviews with 37 incarcerated women on their experience of rage towards their intimate partner. Participants used specific criteria to distinguish their experience of rage from anger. Rage is described as an overwhelming experience with particular physiological and cognitive changes that takes control of a woman's emotions and actions. In contrast, anger is described as a controllable emotion with a specific termination point. Motivations for acting violently in rage with an intimate partner are described and discussed. Findings suggest a primary trigger for experiencing rage is feeling threatened and feeling emotionally overwhelmed.

What Does Being Gay Have to Do with It? A Feminist Analysis of the Jubran Case

Azmi Jubran was subjected to homophobic harassment throughout his high school experience. In 1996, he filed a human rights complaint against the Vancouver School Board alleging discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. His case was the first in Canada to deal with the issue of school responsibility for peer-to-peer harassment. It also makes a significant contribution to the jurisprudence in the realm of sexual orientation harassment and discrimination. This is because Jubran did not identify as homosexual. Using a critical feminist analysis, this paper analyses the decisions and opinions of the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, Superior Court, and Court of Appeal regarding the relevance of sexual orientation identity and the recognition of harm in the case. Drucilla Cornell's concept of sexual shame, Gail Mason's linking of sexuality harassment to visibility and naming, and Judith Butler's discussion of the power of words to injure are discussed in relation to the case as to whether it would qualify as harassment under these conceptualizations. It is argued that while the precedent carries the possibility of eliminating homophobia in schools, there are significant concerns with the legalistic human rights mechanism that potentially undermine efforts to eliminate oppression and achieve social equality.

Rearticulating the Aunt: Feminist Alternatives of Family, Care, and Kinship in Popular Performances of Aunting

The aunt in contemporary Anglo-American culture is a deserving though oft-overlooked cultural identity for critical feminist analysis. This article examines selected performances of aunting in contemporary U.S. popular culture to illustrate how the cultural work of aunting articulates both dominant and transgressive constructions of family, care, kinship, and feminine agency. The quiet transgressions of popular aunt figures offer potent sites for progressive feminist rearticulations of family life and kinship relations.

Women's paths in science: A critical feminist analysis

AbstractThe author introduces her critical and feminist perspective, elaborates on her critical approach, and discusses how this influenced the development of her research questions, methodology, data analysis, interpretation, and presentation of findings.

Men, Militarism & UN Peacekeeping: A Gendered Analysis

Men, Militarism & UN Peacekeeping: A Gendered Analysis. By Sandra Whitworth. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner. 2004. 225 pp. $49.95.Armed conflict, torture, murder, sexual assault, sexual enslavement, human trafficking and HIV/AIDS—United Nations peacekeepers are sent into conflict-torn countries to help prevent the further spread of these horrors. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan often highlights these brutalities when he publicly calls upon member states to send troops and resources to protect and assist vulnerable populations in conflict zones. In her most recent book, Men, Militarism & UN Peacekeeping, Sandra Whitworth provides a critical feminist analysis of a UN peacekeeping system that not only is failing to protect civilian populations but is also implicated in the spread of HIV/AIDS and in the torture, murder, sexual assault and enslavement, and human trafficking of the very populations the mission was purportedly sent to assist. Throughout, Whitworth uses sharp critical feminist analyses to help us understand why UN peacekeeping missions have too often become sites of violence and abuse.

Women's sexual desire: A feminist critique

This article offers a critical feminist analysis of the biomédical conceptualization of women's sexual desire. The five major features of the biomedical model of female sexual desire examined and critiqued are (a) use of the male model as the standard, (b) use of a linear model of sexual response, (c) biological reductionism, (d) depoliticalization, and (e) medicalization of variation. A “New View,” an alternative to the biomédical model, is offered for reconceptualizing women's sexual problems. This analysis concludes with recommendations for feminist‐based biopsychosocial research.

Home Sweet Home? Decorating Magazines as Contexts for Art Education

This article explores home decorating magazines as gendered pedagogical sites that are especially concerned with art education. First, it describes the wider economic conditions in which these magazines fulfill functions of promoting longing and consumption related to the home. Then, it considers learner/teacher relations and the kinds of discourses communicated through these documents in which craft and aesthetic instruction are nested and entangled. Finally, it suggests ways that understanding these magazines as pedagogical contexts can help educators use and analyze images and curricula within them. Relying on critical media and feminist analyses, a case is made that home decorating magazines are influential in fostering obdurate, taken-for-granted assumptions related to the nature of art education as a school subject.

Engendering Citizenship? A Critical Feminist Analysis of Canadian Welfare-to-Work Policies and the Employment Experiences of Lone Mothers

Engendering Citizenship? A Critical Feminist Analysis of Canadian Welfare-to-Work Policies and the Employment Experiences of Lone Mothers

‘I Got Married to Get Free of Home’

This article describes a life-story study of 13 women living in deep and long-term poverty in Israel. Most of the women married at a young age and became mothers a short time thereafter. A combination of narrative and feminist-critical analysis shows that the women perceive marriage as a kind of ‘fate', and as the critical stage of their lives. Most of them were coerced into marriage whether by economic circumstances or by their families. Nevertheless, their stories give evidence of an interior dialogue concerning marriage as an expression of self-definition and as a struggle to escape distress. The article gives some directions for the ‘ methodological awareness’ necessary in such research and suggests some implications for social work.

A critical feminist analysis of the homeplace as learning site: expanding the discourse of lifelong learning to consider adult women learners

Using a critical feminist analysis, this paper delves into the way in which current discourses in lifelong learning are frequently delineated by a masculine and competitive framework of values, reflective of the impact of the global marketplace. To challenge these underlying assumptions of what constitutes important learning, the article focuses on the significance of the homeplace as an important site of living and learning. By examining how identity, relationships, and labour within the homeplace impact upon and shape learning experiences, insights may be gained into the particular challenges that women learners face. From this, attention can be focused upon developing supports for women learners. At the same time, the article raises questions about underlying value structures that need to be addressed to create a broader and more inclusive perspective of lifelong learning.

Like it or Not

The authors reply to Haithe Anderson's critique of their conceptualization of feminist critical analysis. They reaffirm and elaborate on what makes conventional policy analysis incapable of undoing the power asymmetries that characterize relations between male and female academics.

Like It Or Not: Feminist Critical Policy Analysis Matters

The authors reply to Haithe Anderson's critique of their conceptualization of feminist critical analysis. They reaffirm and elaborate on what makes conventional policy analysis incapable of undoing the power asymmetries that characterize relations between male and female academics.

Female Christ-figures in Films: A Feminist Critical Analysis of Breaking the Waves and Dead Man Walking

(2002). Female Christ-figures in Films: A Feminist Critical Analysis of Breaking the Waves and Dead Man Walking. Studia Theologica - Nordic Journal of Theology: Vol. 56, No. 1, pp. 27-43.

Editorial: Recognizing Two Important Developments

With this issue it is my great pleasure to introduce three Associate Editors for Theory & Psychology: Huib Looren de Jong, Kareen Ror Malone, and Clare MacMartin. Our gradual expansion over the past decade has ensured a steady flow of manuscripts and, more important, these have covered a variety of topics and papers that warrant the skills and knowledge of multiple editorial hands. Drs. Malone, MacMartin and Looren de Jong bring a strong range of expertise including such domains of knowledge as the philosophy of science and cognitive theory to discourse analysis and critical feminist analysis. All three have contributed to the journal in recent years, both as authors and reviewers, and we are very pleased to have these three strong scholars from North America and Europe take on these positions. The arrival of our Associate Editors marks a certain maturation in the development of the journal and a recognition that there is a diverse and dynamic community that both reads the journal and contributes to its development. We will, as always, continue to rely on the review process, recruiting additional members from the scholarly community to review manuscripts and to rely on our Editorial Board that will continue to be responsible for the greater share of adjudicating manuscripts. We welcome our Associate Editors and look forward to their participation in, and further shaping of, Theory & Psychology. With the changing publishing environment we are also making possible a process of electronic submission procedures. Beginning in 2002 authors may submit manuscripts in electronic or traditional formats. Details of formats and submission procedures are announced in the inside back-cover and are posted on our web page. Authors are encouraged to consult the web page prior to submitting a manuscript electronically (www.psych.ucalgary.ca/ thpsyc/). It is likely that we will move towards an all-electronic system of submissions and review within the next few years. As always I welcome your feedback and comments on these and any other aspects of the journal.

Sport and Physical Activity in the Life-Cycle of Girls and Women with Disabilities

Physical activity and sport are integral aspects of the human life-cycle of girls and women including girls and women with disabilities. Girls and women with disabilities actively seek physical activity and have become increasingly more visible and active participants in sport opportunities ranging from organized physical activity programs to recreational pursuits and elite sport competitions. To date, the researchers have focused on the influence of sport (and physical activity) upon girls and women with disabilities, thereby leaving the influence of girls and women with disabilities on sport as a social institution as a new frontier for critical feminist analysis.

THE PROMISE KEEPERS' USE OF SPORT IN DEFINING “CHRISTLIKE” MASCULINITY

This article analyzes how a fundamentalist Christian movement, the Promise Keepers, uses sport in its literature as a means of promoting a specific style of masculinity and male leadership, which is referred to as “Christlike” masculinity. Two books foundational to the Promise Keepers' ideology, What Makes a Man and Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper, serve as the basis for this research. A critical feminist analysis is used to examine the ways in which sport is used to construct a masculinity that encourages a patriarchal ideology. Highlighted are three ways in which sport is employed to support a patriarchal ideology. These include using sport as a demonstration of masculine qualities that are linked with superior leadership, using sport as a means to rally men around male superiority, and using sport images and metaphors to conjure mental images of male superiority.

Beyond "true" and "false" memories: remembering and recovery in the survival of childhood sexual abuse.

As survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) struggle to grasp and reclaim their selves, their stories, and their futures from the grip of aftereffects of trauma, the processes of recovery and rehabilitation are interwoven with remembering. Questions about women's delayed memories of CSA have stirred a controversy that places clients' credibility at stake. Nurses need to understand the historical and political roots of this controversy and to be familiar with the empirical knowledgebase that exists about traumatic memory. This article is a critical feminist analysis of the topic. Its purposes are to provide a historical context for the current debate about "true" and "false" CSA memories; to discuss selected literature about conventional understandings of memory and their relevance to this debate; to present an integrative, phenomenological approach to memory in the recovery and rehabilitation of women CSA survivors; and to use the insights gained to draw conclusions from a nursing perspective about the authenticity of delayed CSA memories. Phenomenological concepts of reminding, reminiscing, recognition, body memory, place memory, and commemoration are discussed as they illuminate the complexity of traumatic memories and the recovery and rehabilitation needs of survivors of childhood sexual abuse.

A Critical Feminist Analysis of the Final Report of the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies

Proceed with Care: The Final Report of the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies is one of a series of official studies that have appeared in a number of jurisdictions since the beginning of the 1980s addressing medically assisted human reproduction. These reports are a product of uncertainties and conflicts in the governance of human reproduction at the present time and pose the classic questions of governance: how to use power to improve national well being, what ends to seek; what evils to avoid; what means to use and what is the nature of the persons upon whom they act.

Gender and new regionalism in Latin America: Inclusion/exclusion

'Mexico should have waited to be caressed first, before dropping its pants.'1 With these words Jesus Silva Herzog, former finance minister of Mexico, summed up his criticism of President Salinas de Gortari's proposal for a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The most interesting aspect of his statement is not that Silva Herzog is opposed to NAFTA but that he chose to use a gendered metaphor to voice his opposition. As Carol Cohn has so aptly shown in her essay about US defence intellectuals, gendered metaphors are often used in international relations without much thought being given to their (unintended?) implications.2 Whether intended or not Silva Herzog's remark underlies the need for critical feminist analyses of 'new regionalism' at the empirical as well as the theoretical level. Yet, to date there is a dearth of information about the gender implications of emerging regional trading blocs. In this article I will try to take one of the first steps towards filling this gap. However, before embarking on this project it is imperative to outline briefly the global processes of political and economic restructuring of which the 'new regionalism', and particularly NAFTA, are part.